History
The first deliberately slow password-based key derivation function was called "CRYPT" and was published by Robert Morris in 1978 for encrypting Unix passwords. It used an iteration count of 25, a 12-bit salt and a variant of DES as the sub-function. (DES proper was avoided in an attempt to frustrate attacks using standard DES hardware.) It also limited passwords to a maximum of eight ASCII characters. While it seemed a great advance at the time, CRYPT(3) is now considered inadequate. The iteration count, designed for the PDP-11 era, is too low, 12 bits of salt is an inconvenience but does not stop precomputed dictionary attacks, and the 8 character limit prevents the use of stronger passphrases.
Modern password-based key derivation functions, such as PBKDF2 (specified in RFC 2898), use a cryptographic hash, such as MD5 or SHA1, more salt (e.g. 64 bits) and a high iteration count (often 1000 or more). There have been proposals, such as scrypt to use algorithms that require large amounts of computer memory and other computing resources to make custom hardware attacks more difficult to mount.
In 2009, a new key strengthening algorithm, scrypt, was introduced that demands large amounts of memory to evaluate, limiting the use of custom, highly parallel hardware to speed up key testing.
Read more about this topic: Key Stretching
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)